I was in a band active in the mid 2000s (think myspace era) and we never signed up for, or collected any of our publishing. Somehow, we still stream quite well so have been actively trying to connect the dots on this stuff over the past few months.
They do NOT make it easy, and if you want to collect internationally as a DIY artist, its basically impossible. Trying to navigate this is almost a full time job.
The estimate range is our best guess for money specifically in the MLC, which is for US digital streaming mechanicals for all DSPs (Spotify, Apple, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon, etc.)
Got a 500 shown as an error message on your site, related to a failed connection to Spotify.
Or is this for music distributed by DistroKid, CDBaby etc. before 2018?
Masters is the recording themselves, made by recording artists, distributed by record labels and distributors (DistoKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, etc.)
Publishing is the "work" or the song... made by songwriters, and royalties are processed by Music Publishers and PROs (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC).
A good way to wrap your head around it is... I can record a cover of Katy Perry's Firework... I can distribute that master (and make money) to DSPs like Spotify etc... but I do not own the "song" Firework.
The Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC) is the body that governs US digital streaming mechanical royalties, which is a right on the publishing side.
Public performances like a live concert get a different category of license.
Playing specific songs on demand requires permission, IIRC.
On that note, would it really be hard to use my own deployment of your app to check against the datasources your deployment uses?
That being said, everything we use here, the MLC Bulk Data feed and the Spotify API are publicly available.
https://www.themlc.com/bulk-database-feed ($100 sign up fee and $25/mo)
In your own words:
> We take your Spotify stream count, estimate what that means across all services, take the US portion, and multiply by the US mechanical rate.
As someone who models stuff for part of my living, I understand the spirit of what you are achieving here, but there are too many assumptions / genuine unknowns. Like just in terms of the things you said: you would need the real premium and and supported stream counts over time, the relative market share and stream counts in other services over time, broken down by country, and of course, what "mechanical rate" really means, because there's what Spotify pays versus everything else, and what Spotify, for example, pays, is really fluid.
For other readers: Artists certainly think in terms of pay per stream, but that's not really how Spotify pays, for many payees (the MLC and the other categories). So even though this guy making this website is a professional in the music industry and knows all this, he is so focused on lead gen that he keeps things simple - fine, that's valid - but nonetheless wildly inaccurate.
All that being said, the low-end of the estimate is VERY real, because we sum up an actual number provided by The MLC. For their unmatched data, they provide a range of one dollar sign ($) $0.01 - $0.99, ($$) $1.00 - $10.00, ($$$) $10.01 - $50.00, ($$$$) $50.01 - $250, and ($$$$$) $250.01 and above. Those exact figures get worked into the estimate, and are real hard baselines that we use for the estimate. There is no inflation from us on those figures. When a track has an unbounded (five dollar sign), we then use Spotify counts to estimate where in the range it falls.
I appreciate the thoughtful conversation.
Wow, streaming is great.
That being said, the MLC has been holding this money for 6 years, and by law (The Music Modernization Act 2018), they can't hold it forever, so they have to disperse it somehow. So the best thing for artists to do here is go register their songs so they get their money.